‘The Greatest Enterprise of Its Kind’: The Oxford English Dictionary

Creating the OED was a mammoth undertaking that took half a century to compile

Volunteers compiled thousands of quotation slips to mail to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. Owen Massey McKnight/Flickr/CC BY SA 2.0

On June 6, 1928, 150 men gathered for a formal dinner in London’s magnificent Goldsmiths’ Hall. In this glittering assembly of intellectuals were bishops, peers of the realm, publishers, writers, and professors, including one J.R.R. Tolkien, who had not yet attained world fame as the creator of “The Lord of the Rings.”

In his Prologue to “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary” (Oxford University Press, 2003, 260 pages), Simon Winchester takes us back to that Wednesday night in June, where the diners feasted on smoked salmon, clear turtle soup, muscat salad, fine wines, and other gastronomical delights. Once they had partaken of these delicacies and toasts were offered to king and country, the men lit pipes or cigars and turned their attention to the evening’s principal speaker, the Right Honorable Stanley Baldwin, Britain’s prime minister.